Allisa Cherry is the author of An Exodus of Sparks (Michigan State University Press) and the winner of the 2024 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and The Sewanee Review’s poetry contest. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review, EcoTheo, and Salt Hill. Raised in a rural religious community in the irradiated high desert along the eastern border of Arizona, she has since relocated to the Pacific Northwest, where she completed her MFA in Poetry at Pacific University. Allisa works in workforce development, teaching classes for immigrants and refugees transitioning to life in the United States, and serves as an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review.